﻿Grove Press is a hardcover and paperback imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. Grove Press
was founded on Grove Street in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1947. But its
true beginning came in 1951 when twenty-eight-year-old Barney Rossett, Jr.
bought the company and turned it into one of the most influential publishers of
the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. From the outset, Rossett took chances: Grove published
many of the Beats including William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen
Ginsberg. In addition, Grove Press became the preeminent publisher of twentieth-century
drama in America, publishing the work of Samuel Beckett (Nobel Prize for
Literature 1969), Bertold Brecht, Eugene Ionesco, David Mamet (Pulitzer Prize
for Drama 1984), Harold Pinter (Nobel Prize for Literature 2005), Tom Stoppard,
and many more. The press also introduced to American audiences the work of
international authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Mikhail Bulgakov, Marguerite
Duras, Jean Genet, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz (Nobel Prize for Literature 1990),
Kenzaburo Oe (Nobel Prize for Literature 1994), Elfriede Jelinek (Nobel Prize for
Literature 2004), Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Juan Rulfo. In the late 1950s and
early 1960s, Barney Rossett challenged the obscenity laws by publishing D. H.
Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and then Henry Miller’s Tropic of
Cancer. His landmark court victories changed the American cultural
landscape. Grove Press went on to publish literary erotic classics like The
Story of O and ground-breaking gay fiction like John Rechy’s City of
Night, as well as the works of the Marquis de Sade. On the political front,
Grove Press published classics that include Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of
theEarth, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Che Guevara’s The
Bolivian Diary, among many other titles. In 1986, Barney Rosset sold the
company and the press became part of Grove Weidenfeld. In 1993 that company was
merged with Atlantic Monthly Press to form Grove Atlantic, Inc.

Since 1993, Grove Press has been both a hardcover and paperback imprint of Grove
Atlantic publishing fiction, drama, poetry, literature in translation, and
general nonfiction. Authors and titles include Jon Lee Anderson’s Che
Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, Robert Olen Butler’s A Good Scent from a Strange
Mountain (Pulitzer Prize for Literature 1993), Kiran Desai’s Inheritance
of Loss (Man Booker Prize 2006), Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish
(Commonwealth Prize 2002), Ismail Kadare’s The Siege, Jerzy Kosinski’s Steps
(National Book Award 1969), Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls, Nick
McDonell’s Twelve, Catherine Millet’s The Sexual Life of Catherine M.,
Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon, Kay Ryan (Poet Laureate of the
United States 2008/9) as well as Antonio Lobo Antunes, Will Self, Barry Hannah,
Terry Southern, and many others.

“Briskly paced and sumptuously written, the novel ponders questions of nationhood, modernity, and class, in ways both moving and revelatory.”—The New Yorker

"Desai has a touch for alternating humor and impending tragedy that one associates with the greatest writers, and her prose is uncannily beautiful, a perfect balance of lyricism and plain speech.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

Barry Hannah Long, Last, Happy

“Barry Hannah is the best fiction writer to appear in the South since Flannery O’Connor.”—Larry Mcmurtry

“Barry Hannah is an original, and one of the most consistently exciting writers of the post-Faulkner generation.” —William Styron, Salon

From Thomas Perry, the New York Times bestselling author of the Jane Whitefield series, comes a whip-smart and lethally paced standalone novel, Forty Thieves.

“Propulsive, darkly humorous.”—Publishers Weekly

“A knockout finale . . . Irresistible.”—Booklist (starred review)

Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes

“I’ve laughed at Catch-22 and wept at The Thin Red Line, but I’ve never encountered a war novel as stark, honest, and wrenching as Matterhorn.I found it nearly impossible to stop reading." —Michael Schaub, NPR

“One of the most profound and devastating novels ever to come out of Vietnam—or any war.” —Sebastian Junger

“Acker discards, mangles, and rewrites literary conventions. Using words as weapons to smash her way into modernity, she pushes language to the tension point, explodes and reclaims it. What emerges is a new way of writing, ensuring Acker’s place at the backbone of America’s postmodern literature.”Boston Sunday Herald

Pussy King of the Pirates

By Kathy Acker

Grove Press

978-0-8021-3484-4 • $13.50 • Paperback • Jan. 1997

Fiction

Kathy Acker was a major figure in postmodern literature for
many years. Pussy, King of the Pirates takes her original, experimental
style one step further, marking the apex of Acker’s abilities as a hypnotic and
daring storyteller.

Loosely related to Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic Treasure
Island, Pussy, King of the Pirates is a grrrl pirate story that journeys
from the most famous whorehouse in Alexandria though an unidentified, crumbling
city that may or may not be sometime in the future, to Brighton Town, England,
and, finally, to a ship headed toward Pirate Island, where the stories converge
and the vision ends.

Ransacking world history, literature, and language itself to
speak to the current zeitgeist, Pussy, King of the Pirates is the
literary analogue to the wild girl energy that dominates our rock and roll
culture in the 1990s.

A daring and passionate litany of disparate narratives and
voices, poetry and prose, words and images, Kathy Acker’s newest novel is
perhaps her most subversive to date. Her meditations on love, sex, death, and
art have made her a writer like no one else working today.